


Kaleidoscope

by Fontainebleau



Series: See Me, Feel Me [3]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Fluff, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 23:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9147523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: What do they keep close at hand?





	

Upstairs at the Imperial there’s a room where the late afternoon sun falls in through the window behind a closed door. Billy pulls off his shirt, soaked through after the day’s work, and Goodnight’s hands press flat over his warm skin; a face rubs against his shoulder, beard prickling, and he feels the speculative touch of soft lips. 

\---

Downstairs in the dimly-lit saloon Joshua Faraday runs his cards through his hands. He shuffles, cuts, slides the deck apart and together, palms a card, flicks it out. The cards speak to his fingers: the softened edges, the tiny notches and creases that distinguish one from another, the slick whisper as they fan and fold. He passes them from hand to hand, makes them flow under and over themselves, coaxes and caresses them.

It doesn’t do to say it aloud: Faraday will tell you that sleight of hand needs practice, that the cards are a livelihood, a distraction, a lure, but that’s not how it is. What he’s holding is the love affair that rules his life, him and the Lady in her fifty-two incarnations. She’s the face-down thrill of the deal, the breathless halted moment when he picks up a hand and teases it apart; she’s the flick of the play, the triumphant turn of a winning hand, the loser’s disgusted throw. Then he gathers, stacks, shuffles, cards running through his hands like water, and it begins all over again, every time just as good as the first.

She flutters and flickers under his practised touch, fixes him with a sly sideways smile; he riffles down the edge of the deck with his thumbnail, walks a card round his fingers, slips it back into the pack, and his one true love dances just for him. 

\--

Billy stands at the basin, water beading on his skin, as Goodnight, sleeves rolled up, rubs circles down his back with a soapy cloth, feeling the tremor of a laugh under his hand. He passes it back for Billy to wring out and as he waits he trails a fingertip across the slippery expanse of skin, feeling the play and shift of the muscles, down to the dip of his spine. 

\--

Sam sits his horse up on the ridge, surveying the day’s progress, and as he plans and calculates his fingers press at his throat unawares. No one lives out on the frontier without picking up scars, and his history is written on his body like everyone else: he carries powder burns, the star of a stabbing over his ribs, the healed pucker of a bullet in his arm. But these scars, stroked under an absent hand, are different.

To the eye they’re vicious, jagged, but to the touch the ridges are silky-smooth, a formation known and familiar, twisting and skeining like the channels of a river. Time was he considered them a curse, buttoned his collar high and tried not to see them, deciphering only hate and fear as his fingers followed the ridges, but over the years he’s taken them into himself, transformed them into a gift of memory.

When he fastens his shirt or unbuttons it, when he loosens his collar, when he lies on his bedroll and rests his hand flat over them, he remembers his mother’s hug, her hand on his hair, her unspoken language of comfort and pride; he remembers his sister taking his hand, leaning against him as he read, trusting and affectionate, and his touch draws out hope and consolation from beyond that dark night.

\--

Goodnight could do this for himself, but Billy takes him by the shoulders and eases him down onto the edge of the bed, loosens the knot with nimble fingers and unwraps the bandage: one firm hand holds his arm still as the other exposes the shallow bloody wound, carefully tests the skin around it and reaches for the cloth. He dresses it, rewraps it, ties the knot tight, intent and methodical, and his hands speak what neither of them is willing to address in words. 

\--

Vasquez is still working, absorbed in the rhythm of cutting, sawing, planing. He’s stripped right down, flashy jacket and clinking silver set aside, all except the medal tight around his neck on a sweat-soaked cord. As he stands and stretches it’s reflex for his thumb to rub over it, the complex pattern as familiar as his own name. It looks like the symbol of a patron saint, a lingering relic of a faith worn thin, but what it carries is older than that, _old_ old, as his _abuela_ said when she gave it to him and tied the cord around his neck.

As he circles over the grain of the design the things he’s lost echo under his touch. His language, still heavy on his tongue, his land. The home he couldn’t wait to put behind him, slipped out of reach into the past. The men and women who have tapped at it, ran a finger under the cord and used it to tug him closer into a kiss. He’s had to learn fear of human touch, the arresting hand, the connecting punch, the amiable slap on the shoulder and the bought affection which might lead to the gallows. The first twitch between his shoulderblades, the first prickle of interest, start him like a hare and send him running for a place where he feels nothing. In the worst times, alone in the drowning dark, he’s clutched the metal in his fist until the pattern was bitten into his skin. 

\--

A black-gloved hand spans a cheek, tracing delicately along the bones; fingers ghost across closed eyes, stroke a strand of hair back into place. He cups both hands around Goodnight’s face and feels the contour of his smile.

\--

Red Harvest is out beyond the town, beyond the farms and the tamed land, where the trees still grow and the spirits can speak to him clearly. He lays out what he needs in front of him with meticulous respect: the bundles of powder, red, blue, yellow, white, fat to mix them, a chip of mirror, a stick of bone; he begins the chant under his breath. The sun is still hot on his back as he mixes the paste, each colour in its own dish, working it to an even texture, fat clogging on his fingertips; then he picks up the bone, dips it in the pigment and begins, drawing it across his nose, down his cheeks, under his chin.

He scoops up a handful of oily red paste, squashes it between fingers and thumb, spreads it across his forehead, along his temples, over his eyelids. As he works it into his skin he feels the touch of others behind his own hands: old Buckthorn painting his face at initiation, breath sour on his face as he worked; Jayhawk and he drawing the patterns for each other before their first raid, mad with excitement and fear; the day he left, Spring River sombrely giving him a new face for a new destiny.

He takes up the bone again to trace the delicate overlay of details, each stroke and dot speaking a name, and as his face takes shape under his fingers he draws the lines of a path that his feet will walk.

\--

Goodnight runs both hands through Billy’s hair, dusty silk, down to the nape of his neck, and as he draws him in the dark fall of it sweeps forward to tickle his face, delicate and feathery, soft as the fur of a fox. 

\--

Jack Horne is knee-deep in the creek, in the privacy of overhanging trees, pouring cold clear water over his head like a benediction. As he sluices away the grime of the day’s labour he comes alive to the cool cascade down his chest, the swirl of the current around his calves and the fine grit under his feet.

Outside is where he belongs, the town’s boxed-in closeness and press of humanity trapping him, confining him. Once he lived as a husband, a father, his children climbing on his knee, riding on his shoulders, tumbling together like cubs, his wife all strength and passion in his arms, but that time he laid to rest in the earth. Now he wraps himself in the landscape, in clothes of hides and furs, turns his face to the sun and rain, gives his senses to the land under his feet.

It’s the tracker’s art, skin alert to the brush of leaf and bark, fingers reading the flattened grass, the dried course of water, the grain of the stone and the river’s mud. The pebbles of the streambed shift as he wades to shore, the wind grazes his skin, and Jack fills his heart with the living touch of the world.

\--

Goodnight stands at the window, watching the sun set; Billy leans against him, solid and strong, and Goodnight slides an arm across his shoulders. After so many years alone the simplest of touches still seems a rare privilege, a sense to be learnt all over again, like opening a book long closed and put away on a shelf: the scorching press of naked skin, the steadying warmth of comfort in the dark, the unobtrusive contacts of daily care, the laughing flicker of affection. He lets his fingers drift lightly across the back of Billy’s neck, then turns to pick up his hat and open the door with a flourish. ‘Shall we?’ And as their boots thump down the stairs, the careful three feet between them comes crackling to life, singing in his nerve-endings like fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to wanderingsmith for helping me out with the older men!
> 
> Tumblr: fontainebleau22


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